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Jawbone found in Ethiopia set to rewrite history, push back origins of humans

An extraordinary fossil find in the desert of Ethiopia is pushing back the dawn of humankind by approximately half a million years, and rewriting what we know about the evolutionary branching that eventually led to modern humans.

A fossilized lower jaw, with five small teeth, is reportedly connecting the dots between primitive ancestors and modern humans. The specimen is the bone of one of the very first humans – it represents the oldest known human genus Homo - and comes from a time when humans split from the more ape-like ancestors, Australopithecus, identified by the best known fossil skeleton “Lucy”, according to CBC News .

The find is more than 400,000 years older than the oldest fossils belonging to the early humans who eventually gave rise to Homo sapiens, our modern species.

The jawbone was found close to where Lucy was discovered in 1974. The specimen of Australopithecus afarensis, dubbed Lucy, is from 3.2 million years ago. The species walked upright, but only stood a meter tall and had a small brain. This contrasts with the species Homo, “ characterized by an upright, bipedal posture, sophisticated tool-making abilities and a relatively large braincase”, reports BBC News . The Ethiopian jawbone seems to share traits similar to both species, and may be a transitional fossil, filling in an evolutionary gap.

The Ledi-Geraru jawbone. Credit: William Kimbel/Arizona State University

Graduate student of Arizona State University in the U.S., Chalachew Seyoum pulled the 2.8 million-year-old jawbone from the earth at the Ledi-Geraru research area in Ethiopia in 2013. “The moment I found it, I realized that it was important, as this is the time period represented by few (human) fossils in Eastern Africa,” he tells BBC News.

Researchers examine soil at the Ledi-Geraru site in Ethiopia, where Homo jawbone, known as LD 350-1, was discovered. Credit: Brian Villmoare

Paleoanthropologist Brian Villmoare of University of Nevada, and colleagues published a study in the journal Science on the research into the jawbone. Villmoare says, “In spite of a lot of searching, fossils on the Homo lineage older than two million years ago are very rare. To have a glimpse of the very earliest phase of our lineage’s evolution is particularly exciting.”

Field work is being done in the Ledi-Geraru site to see if more fossils can be recovered. More information could help determine if the jaw belongs to a known early species of Homo, or an entirely new species, and researchers are putting off definitively naming it for the time being.

Recent examinations of fossilized human teeth in China and a prehistoric jawbone from Taiwan have been raising questions about the established theories on the history of modern humans, suggesting there may be many species yet uncategorized.

The rare Ethiopian find may help scientists answer vital questions about what prompted the transition from primitive to modern humans. The Science study suggests that environmental changes may have caused a shift in the lives and diet of ancient ancestors. Fossilized plant and animal analysis indicates that lush forest transitioned to dry grassland, and early humans may have adapted according to the new survival needs. However, scientists wait on a larger sample of hominid fossils in order to prove this conclusively.

Prof Fred Spoor of University College London and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig tells BBC News, “By discovering a new fossil and re-analysing an old one we have truly contributed to our knowledge of our own evolutionary period, stretching over a million years that had been shrouded in mystery.”

Featured Image: The 2.8 million-year-old fossilized jawbone with small teeth which may be a transitional fossil between primitive and modern man. Credit: Brian Villmoare

Comments

Very interesting &amp; beautiful papers, but as usual, the discoverers think they've found a Missing Link. Most likely, the fossil (2.8 Ma) is no Homo, perhaps not even closer related to us than to one of the African apes. The mandible looks most like that of an Au.afarensis (female?), perhaps it's simply a late relative of Lucy or Dikika, who lived in the same region, in a comparable environment (although probably generally more open): gallery forest, paleo-lake, near-shore delta-plain with Kobus &amp; Tragelaphus marsh antelopes, Deinotherium, hippos, crocodiles &amp; fish, IOW, not really "in broad agreement with hypotheses addressing the role of environmental forcing in hominin evolution at this time" (= the usual savanna-biased thinking: "Ape-&gt;Man = forest-&gt;plain-running"). The authors have the unfortunate &amp; misleading paleo-anthropological habit of using the term "primitive" when they mean apelike, and "derived" or "advanced" when they mean Homo-like: it would have been much clearer when they simply used "apelike" (or more correctly chimp-, bonobo- or gorilla-like), or else "Homo-like". In any case, the papers confirm that most australopiths lived in wetlands, where they spent a lot more time in the swamp than lowland gorillas today still do (google "Ndoki"), wading bipedally &amp; feeding on waterside &amp; floating vegetation, google "aquarboreal", or see my paper "The aquatic ape evolves: common misconceptions and unproven assumptions about the so-called Aquatic Ape Hypothesis" Hum.Evol.28:237-266, 2013, google "researchGate marc verhaegen".

How many of these fossils even exist? Is there a large enough set to extrapolate that this was a breeding population and not just a genetic abnormality? If an anthropologist found fossil remains of person who had dwarfism he would conclude that this was a distinct species of small humans...? I hate when they jump to a conclusion with a single fossil. This doesn't overturn anything. At least real Anthropologists like Robert Leakey did the work before publishing he had discovered an actual species.

Well, based on what we know these days, compared to 100, 50, 25 or even 10 years ago, what we have here is another case of very old archaic African extinct monkey bones. We know now that there were various different types of hominids walking the continent that we today call Africa, these bones probably very well did have a history with todays African peoples, as we know that large segments of them contain dna from an extinct species of hominid about one million years ago. True Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal skeletal remains have never been found in Africa. I also notice that the reconstructions and physical recreations always look very much like todays Africans, and not Eurasians. I've come across many blacks who look like Lucy and the extinct Homo Erectus portrayed at the top left

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